An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Monday, May 21, 2012

Clara Barton Founds the American Red Cross in her Parlor

Note:Adapted from a post on this date in 2010.

Just the other day we profiled British nurse Florence Nightingale and made a passing comment on how different
the two heroine nurses from opposite
sides of the Puddle were.Today we take
a look at the American, a woman from much more humble circumstances.

By the way, a shout out to all
nurses, among my favorite people.For my
money the great mass rally of nurses for the Robin Hood Tax held on Saturday
was one of the highlights of the protests in Chicago this weekend.They
all looked great in bright red scrubs and green Robin Hood caps.Way to go!

On May 21, 1881 Clara Barton, already famed for her
tireless work as a Civil War nurse,
organized the founding meeting of the Association
of the American Red Cross (later the American
Red Cross) at her Washington, DC apartment.By August, she had organized the first three
local chapters in her summer country home of Danville, New York in the upstate Finger Lakes region and in near-by Rochester, and Syracuse.

Within a month
the fledgling chapters were mobilized to aid the victims of a massive forest
fire in eastern Michigan.It was living example of Barton’s aim to
not only provide aid in time of war, but during domestic disasters as
well.It might have quelled opposition
in the Senate to ratifying the Treaty of the Geneva Convention which
among other things allowed the establishment of an American Chapter of the International Red Cross.

The Senate
finally approved the treaty in March of 1882 and chartered the American Red
Cross.Barton, who had campaigned to
establish the organization for years, was naturally elected the first President, a position she held for the
next 23 years.

Barton was born
on Christmas Day 1821 to an ardent Universalist family in Oxford, one of the western Massachusetts towns that had been a
cradle of the denomination.Her beloved
father was a Revolutionary War veteran
and her high strung mother was subject to fits of abusive rage.The youngest of five children, small for her
age and suffering from a lisp, she was teased and tormented by her siblings.

Yet at an early
age she had to learn to take care of an older sister who suffered a mental
break down and was confined to an upper room of the house and a brother who was
severely injured in a fall.She
changed his bandages, administered pain killing medicine and tended his needs
for two years then suffered deep depression when he recovered sufficiently not
to need her.

In her late
teens she was put to work, initially against her will, as a school teacher in
an effort to overcome her paralyzing shyness. Much to her own and every one else’s amazement
she excelled managing a class of 40 including rambunctious young men near her
own age.

When her school
won a prize for being “most disciplined” she explained to astonished officials
that no discipline was ever needed because, “When they [the boys] found
that I was as agile and as strong as themselves, that my throw was as sure and
as straight as theirs, their respect knew no bounds.”

After that she was a sought after
teacher and commanded the same pay as veteran male pedagogs.She taught for more than 10 years before
enrolling in the Clinton Liberal
Institute in New York state for formal training.

Invited to found the first free
public school in New Jersey on the
Massachusetts model, she moved to Bordentown.
He school was soon so successful that a large new building was constructed and
additional instructors hired.But when
the trustees brought in a man to run it and paid him $600 a year more then she
had received, she angrily resigned and moved to Washington where using some
political influence she became the first woman appointed clerk in the Patent Office and made a man’s salary.

But she was harassed by her male
co-workers and the subject of rumors of sexual indiscretion as a single woman
living alone in the city.When the
election of Democrat James Buchanan as
President ended her Whig patronage
position she was not unhappy.

Returning to Massachusetts she
found herself drifting without purpose and unable to find regular employment
for four years.She studied French and
art and battled bouts of immobilizing depression.

With the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the
patronage of her friend Senator Henry
Wilson she was able to get a temporary appointment as a copyist at the Patent Office making far less
than she had as a full clerk in what was regarded as “an experiment” in
employing women.She eagerly took up the
task of “being a pioneer.”

In April of l865 the men of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, some of
them Barton’s former students, arrived in Washington after being attacked by
mobs in Baltimore.She and her sister Sally Vassall greeted the men at the train station and took
seriously injured men to Vassall’s home to nurse their wounds.And when she discovered that the men’s
baggage had been stolen in Baltimore she rounded up donations of food, clothing
and supplies for the regiment from local merchants.

She soon was tending New York and
New Jersey troops as well, including more former students.When the grateful men wrote home about her
efforts, supplies began being sent to her.After tending the casualties from the first big battle, the disastrous
engagement at Manassas, she began to
systematically appeal for aid to groups like the Worcester Ladies' Relief Committee back home, providing them with
detailed lists of what was needed and how to pack it.

She returned home to attend her
father’s last illness, but was soon back in Washington and somehow wrangled a Quartermaster’s Pass to get to the
front line.She arrived with six wagon
loads of supplies shortly after the Battle
of Culpepper and spent non-stop days tending the wounded, including captive
Confederates.

Soon she considered herself, and
was considered by grateful troops, a member of the Army of the Potomac, arriving with her wagons on battlefields
including Second Manassas, Antietam
and Fredericksburg.The Twenty-first
Massachusettsheld a dress
parade in her honor and made her an honorary member.She often wore a short wasted soldier’s
jacket over her long skirts and kepi on her head.She suffered a life threatening bout of typhoid fever but yearned to return to
the front.

But when Unitarian minister Henry
Whitney Bellows organized the Sanitary
Commission to serve the Army and Dorthia
Dix, a Unitarian laywoman organized a formal nursing corps, Barton found
her individual volunteer efforts were officially discouraged and that female
nurses were to be limited to duty in rear echelon hospitals.Barton preferred to work independently and
bristled at the restrictions Dix placed on her nurses.

She got special permission to
accompany her brother David, the boy
she had once nursed who was now Quartermaster
of the Eighteenth Army Corps which
was dispatched in April 1862 to lay siege to Charleston, South Carolina.At
Hilton Head she found the siege and
bombardment of the port and its harbor forts to be dull compared to the Virginia and she toyed with leaving but
was persuaded to stay by handsome Col.
John H. Elwell, a married officer with whom she none-the-less fell in
love—a first time experience for the forty year old spinster.

Some biographers have described
Barton as “plain,” but contemporary photographs show a trim, attractive woman.She was also spirited and intellectually
challenging.An affair, or at least an
intense romance, was inevitable.

When the siege of Ft. Wagner turned into an intense
battle, Barton moved to the front with fellow Universalist nurse Mary Gage.She saw Elwell wounded and brought him to safety before returning to
tend others.But local commanders were
not as sympathetic to her as were those of the Army of the Potomac and despite
her long hours of service they made her life difficult until she collapsed of
exhaustion and was evacuated back to Hilton Head where the recovering Elwell
nursed her.

When she tried to return to the
front, she was told that only Dix’s nurses would be allowed.

Bitter and disillusioned, she
turned to work with Mary Gage’s mother, the SuffragistFrances Dana Gageamong freed slaves in the area.Gage expanded her horizons turning her more
explicitly to a Feminist social consciousness.They formed a bond that lasted until Gage’s death in 1884.

She returned to Washington in
December 1863 and went into one of her periodic depressions that accompanied
times of enforced inactivity.

When General Ulysses Grant’s bloody spring offensive in 1864 began to
overwhelm the Sanitary Commission, Barton received permission to work in the
hospitals at Fredericksburg.Her friend, Massachusetts General Benjamin Butler, finally gave
her permission to join a forward field hospital.

At war’s end Barton found herself
the most famous woman in America.

In one of his final acts,
President Lincoln assigned her the daunting task of locating missing prisoners
of war and informing families of their fate.She read and answered thousands of letters from families while pouring
over shoddy and incomplete Confederate records.

In 1867 she undertook a
nationwide speaking tour presenting her lecture Work and Incidents of Army Life.The tour provided her first personal
income since leaving the Patent Office at the outset of the war.She also began collaborating with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in advocating
for women’s suffrage.She was especially
valued tor her ability to reach veterans and enlisting their support with the
appeal, “Soldiers! I have worked for you and I ask you, now, one and all, that
you consider the wants of my people. . . . God only knows women were your
friends in time of peril and you should be [theirs] now.”

She split with the most militant
feminists in support of her friend Fredrick
Douglas when she endorsed the Fifteenth
Amendment which gave Black men but not women the right to vote.

Financially secure for the first
time in her adult life, Barton was traveling in Europe when the Franco-Prussian
War broke out in 1870.She offered
her services to the new International
Red Cross.She set up aid centers
behind the lines of each combatant, but especially in Strasbourg, Germany and later in Paris.

After the war
she was decorated by both governments for her impartial service and her work
with prisoners of war.She helped
introduce the family reunion methods she had developed after the Civil War to
the International Red Cross.

Returning to the
U.S. in 1873 with her health broken, Barton spent three years recuperating in
the family home at Worcester and in Danville.She corresponded with the President of the
International Red Cross to ask how she could form an American section.Dr.
Louis Appia replied that she first needed to win public support, get the
approval of the President, and finally, get Congress to approve the Geneva
Convention.She set to work with her pen
placing articles in women’s magazines, veteran’s publications and national
newspapers.

But President Rutherford B. Hayes and many Senators
were hostile.In 1877 she felt well
enough to travel twice to Washington to personally lobby, however
fruitlessly.Finally with the election
of James Garfield in 1880 she had an
ally in the Presidency.Within months of
his inauguration, she held her organizing meeting.

Her long
stewardship of the Red Cross was not without its difficulties.Although the organization responded to such
disasters as the Johnstown Flood and
Galveston Hurricane standards of
local chapters were uneven, and fundraising a chronic problem. Barton’s
go-it-alone style of administration was often ineffective.

In fact like
many visionary leaders, she was not a good administrator.Her failings and the failings of the
organization were often criticized in the press.Disgruntled former associates challenged her
for leadership and set up rival organizations.Despite continuing to recognized and decorated abroad, Barton felt
besieged at home.

By 1904 the Red
Cross had undergone reorganization, not entirely to her approval, and Barton
was carefully eased out as President.

She flirted with
a rival organization, The National First
Aid Association of America, but it and its functions of training local
volunteers were soon absorbed back into the Red Cross.

Responding to
requests from children Barton wrote a juvenile book, The Story of My Childhood, which was published in 1907.She enjoyed attending and being honored at
Suffrage conventions and Grand Army of
the Republic encampments.

Clara Barton died of pneumonia at her home on the grounds of the Red
Cross Headquarters she built at Glen
Echo, Maryland April 12, 1912 at the age of 90.Pretty good for a “frail waif.”